Bringing Low-power Multicore Solutions to Military and Aerospace Facilities
GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms has initiated a collaborative effort with Cavium Networks to facilitate high-performance compute technology using low power multicore processor architectures in military and aerospace applications. The initiative takes advantage of GE Fanuc’s strength in the military/aerospace industry and in the deployment of low-power multicore solutions in the telecommunications industry, as well as Cavium Networks’ leadership in the design and development of embedded multicore processors. The collaboration is expected to lead to the development of new solutions designed for military and aerospace applications that are based on multicore technology.
“Increasingly, communications is at the heart of military computing as defense becomes information-centric rather than weapons-centric,” said Peter Cavill, General Manager, Military & Aerospace Products at GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms, a unit of GE Enterprise Solutions, “and military customers face the same kind of challenges as those faced by companies in the telecommunications field. Today, we deliver a range of Cavium OCTEONTM processor-based solutions to our telecommunications and enterprise customers. …this collaboration will enable our military/aerospace customers to take advantage of the same high-performance, low-power and secure technology.”
Applications for the OCTEON-based technology that will likely be of interest to military customers relate to the requirement for the absolute security of information transmitted via a network, together with the need to manage network resources in the most efficient manner, so as to maximize throughput. These will include deep packet inspection, network monitoring, intrusion detection, firewalling and other intelligent networking applications.
“Embedded multicore processing technology has been widely deployed by commercial networking, wireless, storage and security vendors in datacenter, enterprise and service provider industries,” said YJ Kim, Senior Director of Networking Communications Division at Cavium Networks. “The OCTEON II family of processors, with up to 32 cores each running at up to 1.5GHz, coupled with the military/aerospace expertise of GE Fanuc, will bring wire-speed deep packet inspection, network intelligence and security to specialized military applications.”
GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms currently takes advantage of the capabilities of Cavium Networks’ multicore processors in solutions designed for the telecommunications industry. Most recent of these are the WANic 56511 and 56512. Designed to enable the creation of faster, higher bandwidth networks by offloading network processing tasks from the server, the WANic 56511 and 56512 are the first PCI Express packet processors to feature the OCTEON Plus CN5650 12-core 750MHz processor. The WANic 56511 and 56512 are complemented by one of the industry’s broadest products ranges which include Ethernet switches and network interfaces, AdvancedMCs and modular platforms.
OCTEON multicore processors provide a scalable range from one to 32 cnMIPS cores on a single chip along with advanced networking, security and application hardware acceleration. The cnMIPS core is Cavium’s custom implementation of MIPS64 release2, optimized for networking and for services with very low power consumption.
